the bride speaking at her wedding.

Good grief not in my day, haircut, national service etc...

You'll always be classy to me.

I spent 18 years trying to break free of the orbit of my hicksville home town, and the next 20 or so coming to terms with the fact that, actually, I really like it there. I work there one day a week now and occasionally run into the grey ghosts of people I knew at school. I used to want to yell at them : "I don't live here! I've been away for 20 years! I've lived abroad, you know!" but I'm over that now. Sometimes I think the ones who stayed close to their roots did the right thing.

but it does look rather leafy and quiet these days. Very appealing, and a lovely place to grow up. But I don't know anyone there now and my parents live in the next town. Plus, I don't have kids so there's no urgency to get out of London.

One day perhaps.

Delightful post topped off with a bit of Motorhead.

Only here.

Myself, Mrs Beezer and Little Miss Bossy Boots Beezer are in the throes of planning very much the same thing.

Classic, cliched mid-40's pangs for home. I, at least, have lived and worked in London for the past 25 years. It has been and remains a gas (despite some recent moans about the humidity this close to the equator giving a me sweaty arse during working hours).

However whilst we have good close friends and wonderful neighbours, family close by we have none. LMBB Beezer's nearest cousin to compare bogeys with is some 120 miles away.

So we feel a little detached on her behalf. Our childhoods were rich and bustling affairs with aunts, cousins, and uncles buzzing about like flies round shite. We'd prefer that for her if possible.

So, at some point in the next year or so we would like to head back to Northumberland. Bringing up our Southern ways, plasma tellys and shower gels.

It's not really an IT Service Management hub though. Not unless Alnwick suddenly transforms itself into Manhattan. That would be worth seeing. 'Hey buddy, can i get a half caff de-caff pease pudding stotty to gan?'

No.

I can't say I've ever had a hankering to return to my roots - in fact, I've deliberately moved progressively further away over the years. But then, I come from Basingstoke. I'm in Manchester now - next stop Scotland?

And I also have shameful memories of the special school at the bottom of our playing field in the 70s. It was called Dove House, but we hilariously referred to it as Div House, of course. Some of the kids used to come up to the big school for a day sometimes and would get treated horrendously by the 'normal' kids, all under the ambivalent eye of the teachers. Now I have a daughter with special needs I am mortified that I ever joined in the playground taunting. Kids, eh? Little shits all of them (except mine).

...share the same home town. Niece did this song about getting out of the place and wife went home and did some pics - don't think it made her nostalgic at all.But increasingly we spend more and more time in my home town of Liverpool.

I've lived abroad for 30 odd years and, with no siblings, Mum dead and Dad well down the slippery slope I should (and had intended to) be preparing to cut the umbilical that connects me to Poole and sail off into the sunset, never to darken its quayside again. But then a funny thing happened...

On a recent trip (there have been many in the last few years for reasons mentioned above) my wife suddenly asked me whether I had ever thought of buying a flat there to, you know, "keep your roots intact, for the children...and grandchildren...". No, was my instant and emphatic reply, nothing was farther from my mind, been there - done that, have to move on. Then she gave me one of her "Hmm looks" which can best be described by imagining her saying "hmmm" while her face looks back to what she was doing at one speed but her eyes lagging behind. Hope that makes sense. Anyway, I know that look and I knew instantly I was in trouble.

So, here I am poring through property brochures bathed in memories of wall to wall grockles in the summer followed by that unique desolation that is only found in seaside towns on rainy winter days. She engaged the reserve troops (the kids) and they are collectively wearing me down, I've not given up yet though. I don't have many friends left there and those I have are different people to those I left in 1977, only an Auntie and a couple of cousins and the thought that Mum so desperately wanted to see more of me and the grandchildren when she was alive it seems cruel to come back after she's gone. Totally illogical I know.

However, it is such a nice place and I still feel at home there. I'll let you all know how I get on.

to any of this. My tombstone may well say born Wimbledon, lived Wimbledon, worked Wimbledon, Died... Must get out more.

...but lived in a nearby village during my teens. I moved away to go to college up north and stayed there for a few years afterwards. Eventually after a long-term relationship broke up I decided I wanted to be nearer to the rest of my family and moved back.

We moved around a lot when I was a child so I can't say this was my childhood home, but returning to Stroud on the train in the years that I lived away always gave me a homely feeling as the landscape changes to rolling Cotswold hills as you approach.

... I can say if I end up living there again something will have gone sadly wrong.

Ugly, maze like concrete buildings linked by litter strewn underpasses, redolent of urine, and populated by troglodyte neds topped off with constant atmosphere of shimmering threat made worse by the prevalent religious bigotry, getting away from there was the highest priority of my young life. Bookish sensitive types like me were just prey.

I go there, see my parents, see my granny and get the fuck out, counting my blessings every time...

I have a few tunes that I will always associate with particular corners of my hometown. However, on the few occasions that I've been back, it's always a jolt to find that the modern reality doesn't match the feelings induced by the music. The songs are really links to people rather than places, and both have moved on. The pubs have closed, the buses are a different colour and the clothes shop where I bought my treasured red-lined biker jacket in 1977 is now a mobile phone outlet. It's quite an expensive business coming 'home' from Australia, so these days I tend to use Google Maps Street View if I want to walk the streets of my old town. Or I just listen to the Go-Betweens 'Streets of Your Town', which makes me instantly homesick for where I am now.

Infill development and insensitive town planning mean I can barely find my way around anymore. So no, no desire to go back.

In fact born in Kearsley. As in Kurs-lee, not Kears-lee that the KLF twonks sang in Grim Up North. My mum, brother and sister still have houses there, whereas I moved up the greasy pole to Farnworth, Bolton and now Westhoughton, via Leeds. My home in Farnworth was for many years a greengrocers's shop so I always had the best veg that nature had to offer i.e. tinned peas. The shop eventually got taken over by the expanding next door dental practice. I have just joined their list but have not been treated in the old place yet but my mother has sat in the dentist's chair in her old bedroom. Spooky.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitefield,_Greater_Manchester

not a bad place,doubt I would move back though

born and lived in for the first 2 years of my life and felt not one single urge to return. Unfortunately, it was for a funeral and I've only got 2 distant relatives still in the area but I don't feel any partisanship at all with the place. Not when driving past the old house, the cemetery where my grandad is buried or anywhere else.

My growing years were in a town I occasionally visit for mainly work reasons but, again, I feel no pull towards it. I didn't even when I went back frequently while my parents were still alive. Not the remotest tug. In fact, Mrs. F. fancied buying a house there and I felt very ambivalent about it - I'm glad we didn't, in the end.

Home, to me, is where you make it and what you make of it.

Didn't so much leave as fled to university in England in 1980 with an ambition to never live there, or anywhere else in NI, ever again.

So far kept to that promise and as the years pass and the older generation pass on my visits "home" have become increasingly infrequent I feel I no longer know or actually like the place that much.

So no return anytime soon.

This song captures a lot of my feelings about my home town;

I love Liverpool but I'm happy where I am. If I could afford to get to Anfield for every home game, I'd be even happier.

Hope my life never gets so bad I have to go back to live where I grew up, a place where you spent your youth keeping your wits about you in case one of the gangs got you.
The only reason I went back was to see my Mum when she was alive. As soon as she passed on and I sold the house I swore I'd never set foot in such a miserable, crummy craphole of a town. Filled with wee neds with pit bulls, teenage mums with hair pulled back, permanently in trakkies pushing their prams. 3/4 of the shops boarded up, the only places booming are the chip shops, the bookies and the pubs.
I have friends there that have never moved away and they have developed this sad and grey look that envelopes anyone who spends anytime in this dump. Even the local football team are rubbish.
Drakeygirl is lucky to look on her home town with affection.
Even it's most famous person is a dick with a huge chip on his shoulder! Gordon Ramsey

The name of this dump? Step forward Johnstone, Renfrewshire

Nice post Drakey by the way. I never really felt like I have a home town as such. Being an Army brat I was born over here and then carted off to Germany within a year and never went back to live in the place where I made my first public appearance.

Through lots of moves, countries and schools however we often returned to my birthplace as my Mum's family were from there and we would go and visit my gran, aunt and cousins.

When my dad left the army and settled in a different part of the country, I got to make local friends and it was always weird when I would be with a mate and they would acknowledge someone in the street or pub. "Who's that?" I'd say "Oh, just someone I went to school with", "a friend of my brother" etc...that was completely alien to me!

Living in London for over 10 years once I left home meant that I considered London to be my home-town. It was full of other people who weren't from the Capital, I liked that transience and I didnt get that usual feeling of "not being local from round these 'ere parts".

However, when my gran passed away last year I had to drive up on my own to meet up with my family and attend the funeral. As I turned the corner into her road I was suddenly hit by a real pang of sadness - of course I was upset on losing my gran - but it dawned on me that I would never drive along this road again. A road not far from where I was born, that despite all the towns, houses, schools and countries, the only one constant place in my life was my gran's house, in my town of birth.

That road I'd travelled on for over 40 years, as a baby in a car-seat, as a sulking teenager "are we there yet?", to a spikey haired punk rocker taking over the car stereo "do they have to use such language son?". Then driving there for the first time in my own car once I'd passed my test or driving up to introduce the girlfriend...now I was driving up for the funeral and probably the last time I would have to drive on this road again. It made me think that yes, this was my hometown after all - despite never having lived there at all there was still a bond.

Not sure I would ever move there, but funnily enough my sister has moved to the area, so I'm back there more often again and I do feel a real affinity for the first time.

Too many songs remind me, my mum and dad would always play music on the car stereo and sing along (much to mine and my sister's eternal shame!) as we made the often long trip along that road throughout the years. But I'll plump for "Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick" by Ian Dury & The Blockheads - one of the great pleasures of the journey home after a weekend was listening to the Sunday chart run down and this got to Number 1, must have been 1979, and my mum and dad singing along and saying "this is one of YOUR bands isn't it? Not bad this, got a good beat..."

Piece of writing ..made me play this

Glasgow is my place and I love it dearly, though it did take years to come to that statement. I always assumed I would have move away for work and when I used to go for interviews and end up rolling back on the overnight coach from The South and in my tired, ratty, dishevelled state looking out of the coach window passing some of the scabbier parts of the city did nothing to endear it to me.

Plus then (mid-80s) it all seemed becalmed, not least with my pals. It used to drive me scatty that post-pub they would order Chicken Curry (i.e. not Korma, or Bhuna or Vindaloo, but Curry), Boiled Rice, every single sodding week. I weren't sure what my horizons were then, but at least they did extend to exploring a curry menu.

On the other hand round the time I did finally leave I had started to come round to it. Sure, the neds are always with us, but on my travels I had been to some real toilets, and could see that in comparison Glasgow was starting to make a effort (often mocked) with what it had and because in some ways the place was positively enlightened. It was a shock when I moved to the North Of England and had the throwback of black suited Bouncers, looking you up and down before dismissing you with "Not tonight son, no jeans.".

Plus (no small thing...) by that time my family had moved to a district less desolate, with some trees and green to wake up in the morning.

When I visit the old place my lot will still ask, even after 24 years, whether I hanker to come back, in the full expectation of me feeling that twitch on the thread. Now, Glasgow has has some great qualities, institutions and civil society as well as bars, restaurants and the rest of that good stuff, and in my middle-age I should be firmly placed to take full advantage and not having my nose against the outside window like my young skint self. Plus my family have grown up and we are all pretty good, I reckon, with the next generation coming through to terrorise us rather nicely. My old pals, despite what I wrote earlier, have dispersed round the country (who knew ?) but the circle my family had led me to since do include some great people. But move back ? I doubt it. Something in me bridles at the thought. I may have another move in me instead. Perhaps if I mysteriously acquired the lottery win I would fancy the bijou flat in the West End, , but on the other hand if it all went T.U. I would have be pretty desperate to go scurrying back to the old home town.

I grew up in a Yorkshire seaside town and escaped to Glasgow in my early twenties. Loved the big city, helped me get into the career I'm in, but always felt a bit homesick for the seaside and open space - Glasow could sometimes feel a bit oppressive (and wet !). Always spent quite a bit of my holiday time back in Yorkshire and returning to places I loved.

Eventually the home sickness got worse and persuaded the husband that a move back to the North of England would be good, but the job I dfound actually turned out to take me within 40 miles of home. This seems to be the best option. Easy enough to drive home and see the folks when I want to, or to potter about the cliff tops on a nice day, yet far enough away to feel that I haven't quite gone home. the town itself, like many seaside towns, has seen better days so although it would be lovely to be by the sea again I don't think I could live there.

My Mum on the other hand, only moved 6 miles away from where she grew up. On a day out recently we called into the cemetery in her home village (she's of the age where a cemetery visit is a highlight) and she seemed to know, or know of, about 50% of the people mentioned on the graves. The more I thought about this the more weird it seemed. I can't imagine that happening much these days - people move around so much, don't keep up the home ties.

So until I got married 12 years ago (Yesterday)(Thanks), I had never lived anywhere for more than 8 years. Average probably 5 years.

I'm never moving again from my 3 bed semi with adjoining study. Ever. Even if I win Euro Millions. (Well maybe).

I found a couple of years back that I'd love to connect with people I went to Primary School. I had fond memories. Unfortunately, they didn't so such is life. Still I'll always have the memories.

Like for instance when I was cycling to school trying to get past some geese who chased me every morning hissing and pecking as I passed their farm gate, BASTARDS, and Warlord & Victor my friends when we arrived in a new town.

Oh yes as Yoda would say 'Strange one am I'!

This song takes me back to that place when I was 9. A surprisingly lovely place I must say.

I'm currently living a mile from the house I grew up in. But the time has come to sell up and move on... somewhere. Not sure where yet. Interesting times.

Lovely post, DG, as always.

A work colleague of mine lives in the house he was born in.

He is 58.

That is my idea of hell.

I'm from Stevenage!

I was born in Carlisle as my Dad was stationed at a navy base near there, but we left before I was one. My parents stopped off in the town on a trip to Scotland a few years ago, and my Mum was curious to see the hospital I was born in. They couldn't find it. Talking to a few of the older locals in a pub, they found out that the building in which I came into the world had been demolished, as had the rest of the street, and then the street had been renamed.

I can take a hint.

...and would like to be able to say it sums up how I feel about my home town.

(Paul Simon - My Little Town, BBC recording December 1975)

But that wouldn't be true. I was born and bred in a seaside town in Fife and I loved it. All my family connections are no more and so i get there rarely, but when I do, I realise how much I miss it. At the same time, I know I will never go back. Strange how emotion and practicality co-exist sometimes!

PS Nice thread DG. Glad the move has worked well.

Born here, still here...wouldn't have it any other way. Lucky to have the support of friends and family.

Born in Reading
School in Reading
Married (first time) in Reading
Daughters born in Reading
Married (second time) in Reading
Work about 10 miles from Reading

Parents from Slough (thats about as cosmopolitan as my life gets)

... hot summers day in North London, this in the charts, I can almost taste the Zoom lolly ...

I've really enjoyed the comments. And some top choons, too.

or, if I was being glass half-full, too many home towns to mention. So far I've lived in 27 houses in 9 villages/towns/cities.

A timeline (not that you asked for one):

Birth - 1 week: Bangor
1 week - 5 years: Bethesda
5 - 9: Llangefni
9 - 11: Llangwyllog
11 - 13: Llangefni (again)
13 - 15: Bodffordd
15 - 17: Chesterfield
17 - 19: Bagillt
19 - 26: Liverpool
26 - 36: London
36 - now: York

I didn't stay in touch with anyone I knew from any of these places except for a couple of chums from my London days. My mum and sisters live in a place I've never lived and there's not much family beyond that so home for me is very literally where I hang my hat (currently a green tweed flat cap, hanging on my office door as I type). That said, though, I love North Wales and often fantasise about living there though I suspect that what is glorious as a holiday may become otherwise if I lived there.

I love this kind of thread. The kind that encourages responses that reveal something about the posters other than what they think about Stewart Lee/Michael McIntyre/The Fall/the blog etc. The nature of the original question is such that it makes it almost impossible for anyone to lose their rag. More of this kind of thing, I say!

I also love it because it raised a question, the answering of which made me think about things I hadn't previously considered. Such as, has the absence of a clear and obvious home town, with all that goes along with it like old friends, old haunts etc, affected who I am? It probably has: I find it easy to walk away from people, for example and find it difficult to maintain friendships unless they are ridiculously low maintenance.

Another interesting revelation was the link between moving house (leaving one group of friends behind) and a subsequent change in musical taste. Another timeline (again unasked for)this time showing significant musical likes over time:

Birth - 1 week: Bangor (not sure, probably not that into music yet)
1 week - 5 years: Bethesda (whatever my Nain used to sing to me)
5 - 9: Llangefni (It was all about Showaddywaddy, Darts and David Soul)
9 - 11: Llangwyllog (Grease soundtrack)
11 - 13: Llangefni (again) (Iron Maiden, Twisted Sister)
13 - 15: Bodffordd (AC/DC)
15 - 17: Chesterfield (Sisters of Mercy)
17 - 19: Bagillt (The Mission changing to The Primitives and the Wonder Stuff)
19 - 26: Liverpool (Stuffies, Poppies and Ned's, then Sonic Youth, Pixies and Throwing Muses, then crusty dance, then ambient/techno gubbins, then jungle)
26 - 36: London (difficult music like Aphex Twin, then all the stuff I'd missed before like Neil Young, CSN, Love, Blue Note compilations, Teenage Fanclub revived, Tom Waits.
36 - now: York (the last song I got excited about was Earthquake by This is the Kit. I heard it on 6 Music. Made me want to buy it. This hasn't happened for ages).

Not sure there's anything particularly deep going on here but it's been mighty therapeutic writing it all down. If you stuck it out to the end then I hope you enjoyed it. Thanks.

Born in Hackney in East London (within the sound of Bow Bells, so yes Cockney)spent my younger days between Stoke Newington in North London and the Welsh Valleys and then we settled properly in Old Street in East/Central London. When I left home I spent most of the next 15 or so years living in West London (Paddington/Warwick Avenue/Maida Vale/Ladbroke Grove) and then back to Stoke Newington until I left London two years ago to live out in the West Country.

This is the first time properly I've lived anywhere but London, apart from a short stint in Yorkshire back in the 80s, and I find that I'm not homesick and neither do I relate to the stories and feelings other people have about their hometowns.

London is just so big and so...there that I don't feel like you can escape it. Even now I'm still working here. And it changes so much so quickly that even living in the same area and going nowhere can feel like you've left town. Or rather, the town has left you. The London of my childhood and teenage years is not there anymore, the inner East End used to be a ghost town evenings and weekends but that changed in the late 90s when Hoxton happened. The contrast between the area before and after is extreme, and areas like Stoke Newington and Islington are so far removed from the memories I have of those places when I was younger that I wonder if I imagined them. The constant shuffle of the city (and me - I can't remember how many different flats I've lived in) leaves you feeling a bit rootless.

Despite twice having immigration papers for Australia, I was never away from my home town for long. Yet it took to my 30s to finally commit to stay, and once I did it was a relief and a joy. I'm certainly not going to go down the dodgy road of suggesting that you can't be a member of the community if you come in from outside, but personally, I do like feeling my roots about the place. True, you may wonder whether you have moved on when you commute to work past your old school bus stop and it can feel odd finding yourself back in pubs where you drank underage. But the truth is ('Psychobbable Ahead' warning) that the life you make as an adult in a town is surely different to the one bequeathed to you by accident of birth, but your old home town may still suit your new life. Sure, it helps too if your home town has decent job prospects and enough residents who weren't born there, so that things keep changing. Inevitably, not all contributors have been able to say that. Had I been born in [INSERT PREFERRED NEIGHBOURING RIVAL TOWN, TO TASTE] then by now I would probably be downing stubbies with 'mutikonka' (see above) as part of the Oz chapel of the Word massive.

Two takes on the home town experience from the wonderful Chris Wood. The first hits the nail on the head for feeling attached to your home turf. The line about the badger travelling ancestral highways on the hill has me welling up every time.

but one of the most achingly desperate lyrics I know comes from Albion off his 'Lark Descending'. 'Albion I'm homesick now / Though I live in the town I was born'

I've been putting off going back to my childhood haunts ever since my parents moved away 30 years ago. So, yes, thank you Google Street View. Thank you very much - you've saved me quite a lot of money.

The newsagent's where I asked the proprietor to bring out the box of ex-jukebox singles, which he kept in the back, so that I could have a quick rifle through Health & Efficiency is now a burnt-out shell with only a peeling "THE MAIL ON SUNDAY - A NEWSPAPER NOT A SNOOZEPAPER" poster in the window and a rust-coated Wall's ice-cream freezer visible through the grimy window.

The pub where, aged 16, I deepened my voice and tried to look dead-hard-me as I ordered a half of mild and asked for a set of darts, each of which was the approximate weight of a socket spanner, is now serving "ground spiced chick pea fritter with a confit tomato, olive and cucumber salad and oregano oil" for six quid a pop and taking reservations for Christmas.

The mills down the road have all gone - no surprises there, as only two remained when I left. But I'm not sure that the local initiative for post-industrial renovation is best being served by pimping out the whole area as the "Gateway to Last of the Summer Wine Country". (Oh, yes.)

And that field where we played football (with satchels for goalpoasts because it was always too cold to take your jumper off)? My heart skipped a beat when I saw it's now a properly tended seven-a-side pitch, with real goalposts and all marked out and everything. Then I realised that it lies inside the trespassers-will-be-prosecuted perimeter of the Bond-villain-sized complex that Paul Scholes has built for himself there.

So, yes, thanks, Google Street View. Thanks a bunch.

Dunno about this one - I grew up in rural Cornwall, in a corner which is ridiculously idyllic. But I couldn't wait to get away to Uni because the trouble with these places when you're young is that there is nothing to do.

Still get home 2-3 times a year to see the family and always have a great time. Once I'd got the 'big city' stuff out of my system in my 20s, the more relaxed life certainly appeals again. And yet... no cash machines within 30 minutes, very little cultural stuff going on, lack of decent public transport... after 6 weeks I might end up wondering if I'd made a huge mistake.

I can't afford to move there again anyway due to low local wages / sky high house prices, but that's a whole other rant.

Late to the game as always, but seeing this today made me think of this thread. It's the view of The Town Where I Was Born from the exit from the railway station. I remember Gamleys toy shop, an off licence where you could charm the proprietor, Graham, into letting you have four Harps, and the newsagent that sold ex-jukebox singles

From left: Arson, empty, empty, empty, charity shop, empty. Jesus, what have we done?